The next two months were not easy.
I moved into the foundation's office on the third floor of a brick building in Bellhaven's old town. It was smaller than I'd expected: two rooms, six employees, a filing system that hadn't been updated since the nineties. The executive director's office had a window that faced the harbor and a desk that had belonged to my grandfather.
I sat at that desk on my first day and looked at the harbor and understood, for the first time, what he'd been building.
The foundation had a $14 million endowment. In a good year, it gave away $600,000 in grants. In a bad year, $400,000. It funded scholarships for women at the community college, job training for women leaving prison, childcare for single mothers who worked night shifts. It was a small foundation with a s
